Ramana	Sunyata	Papaji	Bharadwaj	Faqir Baba	Manav Dayal
Nirmala Pandit	Pandit Dayal	Bassi Gulam	Stationmaster	Bhargat Singh	Lakbir Singh
Sita	Shabdanand	Lal Chand	Lahori Pandiji	Ramesh Giri	Asha Thakur

S. N. Bharadwaj - Joy, laughter & love

In the above picture, Bharadwaj is saying goodbye to a small group of people I had taken to his humble home for a visit. He said:

May God bless you all!

Then, with a mischievous grin, he looked up at the grey sky with folded hands and said,

May He bless me too!

What did I learn from visiting so many beings on a spiritual path behind the veil of mysterious India? First of all, I learned that despite the fundamental unity of consciousness, they were extremely different in their personal expression of that very same unity. Hence, I realized that I should not be a copy of any of them but find my own way to express the only way.

However, there was still a common feature among the most noble of them. And that commonality can be summed up in the following sentence:

'The path of spirituality is paved with joy, laughter, and love.'

Actually, I think it is possible to evaluate the soundness of a religious phenomenon by its ability to be joyfully self-ironic. Grandiose gurus and fire-and-brimstone preachers cannot crack jokes from their high moral grounds—especially not jokes about themselves. There are of course exemptions to this rule like the Saint with the Knife and Rod, but they are few.
 
Bharadwaj had escaped the laments of old age. Like Papaji, his overflowing happiness was strongly contagious. I was talking to the forest officer of Hoshiarpur, Swarn Singh. He said about his life long friend and spiritual mentor, Bharadwaj:

'In all these many years...I have not seen him angry once. He is always happy.'

In 1999, I stayed with this wonderful being for more than six months in Hoshiarpur. Late afternoon we meditated in my room at the temple, Manavta Mandir, every night. Sometimes other people joined us, but sometimes it was just the two of us. He always, almost like a punctuality-loving English gentleman, inaugurated our meditation by looking at his watch and saying,

 'Let us begin by meditating for 30 minutes.'

The 30 minutes passed in a snap, but we would still be sitting, transfixed in introversion, 30 minutes beyond the intended time, sometimes meditating for more than two hours before being able to open our eyes again.
 
He then, again with ritual punctuality, looked at his wristwatch, almost to force himself out of introversion, and said,

'The hangover continues.'

Bharadwaj was actually a wealthy man, but as you can see, he did not care about such things. He said:

'The modern man has made so many accumulations in his house
that he has become a slave to that accumulation.'

During daytime I went to his home for a cup of tea in the company of his many books:

Here you see His humble home - books, books everywhere!

Bharadwaj was a true polymath, intellectually quoting freely by heart from Shakespeare to the Upanishads. Before the partition of India and Pakistan, he was a lecturer at the university in Lahore. In this sense, like Gandhi and Nehru, he had a powerful dual academic background with strong roots in Western rationalism as well as Eastern mysticism.

Video of Bharadwaj in his home

I asked Bharadwaj if he considered himself enlightened. He answered that he was just a spiritual seeker, like me. It was a horizontal friendship I had with this wonderful and, in my opinion, almost too humble being. There was not the slightest trace of a guru in Bharadwaj. In fact, it was occasionally confusing for me. Through years of encounters with elevated gurus, I was actually partly brainwashed into outdated medieval vertical social interfaces between masters and slaves. Now, here I could decondition myself, medicate myself daily with a powerful antidote of a kind of humility I had rarely encountered before, and I had this wonderful being all to myself!

Bharadwaj knew all the hidden spiritual gems in and around Hoshiarpur. Many of them had no ashram or followers and simply lived happily alone.
 
The photo below illustrates how we moved around at that time to visit these secret places. Bharadwaj was at that time in his late eighties, but he did not fear jumping on the back of an Indian scooter to travel, sometimes up to 20 km through the intense Indian traffic, just to have a cup of tea with a saint or two.

The video interview from 1999, shown below, marked the beginning of my deep friendship with Bharadwaj.

 First video interview

Like me, Bharadwaj was a spiritual shopper his entire life, drawing inspiration from saints to sinners. He never committed to one guru or one system even though he had great respect and love for the founder of Manavta Mandir, Faqir Baba. I am here to give my respect to the Be Man Temple, where everyone followed in the footsteps of the great Saint Faqir Baba. It was no secret that Bharadwaj had many spiritual followers, and nobody held a negative opinion about that. Hence, Bharadwaj was an integral member of the Radhasoami family.

However, I soon found out who have had the greatest impact on him.
It was not an Indian guru. It was actually a man from Denmark. As a Dane myself, I find this to be a funny, divine joke.

Bharadwaj had in his youth become a close friend of the Danish mystic Emanuel Sørensen-Sunyata. This remarkable being stayed every winter with Bharadwaj in Hoshiarpur when it became too cold in Almora in the Himalayas.

Baharadwaj often spoke about a life changing meeting with Sunyata:

'Sunyata stayed at my house every winter. One fine day in spring, as he prepared to return to his Himalayan retreat in Almora, he had just finished a meeting with spiritual seekers where he said almost nothing. Feeling a bit frustrated, I asked him, 'Dear Sunyata! Please give me a last teaching before you go back to the mountains.'

Then Sunyata looked at me with immense intensity and said with great force:

'You are THAT! You are the ultimate Reality!'

In that very moment, I lost all body-consciousness. I realized the unchangeable Reality—being one with THAT. Several days later, I found someone rubbing some arms. While rubbing, I realized that I was the rubber and that these arms belonged to me. Then I discovered that somehow, I actually had a body.'

Always - really ALWAYS Bharadwaj was talking about God & the Supreme Reality, quoting freely from Shakespeare, Shelly any Spirited Soul or book - East or West. Wery often he spoke about Sunyata. He once asked Sunyata:

'Dont you sometimes feel alone in high mountains?'

Sunyata replied:

'I am not alone
I am al-one.'

Papaji and Bharadwaj
I presented Bharadwaj with Eli Jackson-bear's book about Papaji, Wake up and Roar. Bharadwaj was familiar with Papaji's guru, Ramana Maharshi. He had himself been to Ramana's Ashram in Tiruvannamalai, but after Ramana had left the body. Here are his comments a few days after:

This very efternoon I read a few pages once again from the wonderful book 'Wake Up And Roar" and believe me I got up roaring with self joy and experiencing my unity with one and all. This great book will go down in history as an awakener for generations to come. All hail to the glory of the Great Poonja ji Maharaj and his immortal Ramana Maharshi Maharaj.

In the coming years the name of Papaji was on his lips almost as frequent as Sunyata. Bharadwaj loved to point out their common source in the form of Ramana Maharshi.

Bharadwaj Praises Papaji - February 2010
 


THE VISIT TO THE LION BABA

Bhaharawaj took me for a visit to the proud and stern Lion Baba. The first thing the Lion uttered was:

All experience is unreal - only the experiencer is REAL!

Spirituality seemed to be a very serious subject, at least when looking at this master's face. But then I turned my head to look at Bharadwaj's face and he seemed to face the whole situation with a huge grin. Like Papaji, he was not laughing at anybody or with someone. He was just laughter itself.

And I in a glimpse saw that the One who has realized the truth, lives happily in the big joke of existence.

And finally even the great Lion Baba surrendered to Laughter. And the wave of laughter subsided Bharadwaj was glowing in joyous ease as you can see on the photo below.

In spite of his super sharp, academically schooled intellect, Bharadwaj was, as I hope you can get a glimpse of in the photos below, most of the time in a state of childlike innocence.

One of his favorite statements was to exclaim as he did captured on the photo below:

It is wonderful to be alive!

At the occasion depicted above he cited W. H. Davies:

A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

The photo above is taken in my room in Manavta Mandir. After a long meditation Bharadwaj said this:

"We rise by raising others. Reality exists and thrives as actuality.

Every person is a moving temple of God and deserves to be respected. I recall to mind William Wordsworth's noble sentiments expressed in his poetry. He says:

1. Tread gently on the grass, for every blade
of grass that breathes as a life of its own.

2. Even the meanest flower that blooms
gives me thoughts that lie too deep for tears.

To live the truth is to live in Divine bliss All in one - one in all. Reality is eternal - reality is omnipresent - reality is omnipotent There is nothing but reality - reality is bliss! Divine we are. Let us not forget that we are fragments of Divinity. Let us not remain fractionalized. Let us return home. Let us be established in Unity.
Hare OM - Hare Home

Let the darkness be dispelled. Let the light of divinity shine in every heart - in every corner in every wave - in every tide - in the hole ocean which is unity, unity -  integral Consciousness - Christ Conscioussness - Krishna Conscioussness.

That is our source - we live, we move and we have our being in that source which is eternal, which is supremely intelligent and ever blissfull. We belong to you eternally.
     
On the path of Self realisation it is a mystery how we try to realise what is our own very self and needs no searching outside. One has to wake into one's own self."

THE LATER YEARS
In 2010, Bharadwaj was around 97 years old, and a small number of followers had gathered around him. Over the ten years that I had known him, he had become increasingly ecstatic and happy. The video below vividly shows the exalted state he was in.

The Prodigal Son returns Home - February 2010

 
Bharadwaj left his body at the age of 99 in 2012. Busy in Denmark, I could not arrive in time for the funeral. Some years after his demise, I visited his humble house. The roof had collapsed, and when I looked through the broken windows, I could see rotting books, bricks, and his belongings spread all over in a big mess.

His little wooden postbox with his name on it was still there, but with no letters inside. I gently removed the front of the postbox and took it home to my flat in Denmark.

Every time I look at the name on the small box door, he comes alive in my smile.